During \”Naharin\’s Virus\” a provocatative dance/performance piece that the Batsheva Dance company will excerpt this week at UCLA, a dancer holds chalk in her hand, dragging it through her body movements: Arching her back, outstretching her arm, she trails Hebrew words on a blackboard.
Much to the chagrin of cultural nationalists in places such as France, no culture seems immune to the seductive rhythms of American pop and rock. Fed by a steady diet of American TV and movies, young musicians from places as disparate as Zimbabwe, Paraguay, New Zealand, Mynamar and Egypt have learned to combine their indigenous folk music with U.S.-born-and-bred rock — making for a kind of transglobal, world-beat music with a heavy blues and R&B influence.
In the 1998 hit comedy \”The Wedding Singer,\” the eponymous character was a nice Jewish boy named Robbie. At the Sept. 2 Century City Park Hyatt reception of 30-something newlyweds Daphna Ghozland and David Hollander, the wedding singer is a nice Jewish boy named Robbie. True, the latter — singer/pianist/bandleader Robbie Helperin — will occasionally perform the odd \’80s pop song with his Simcha Orchestra as Adam Sandler did in the movie, but that\’s where the parallels end, or at least, that\’s where Helperin would like them to end.\n\n\”It was kind of painful to watch,\” Helperin said of the movie that immortalized his profession as a \”Loserville\” populated by \”creepy musicians,\” in his words.
Eric, Matt and Chris are three musicians who refuse to give away their last names. But if you guessed it was out of a lack of ethnic pride, you\’d be wrong.
Singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb is eating a tuna sandwich and a spinach salad, talking about \”Cake And Pie.\”
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
David Margolick, writer of books and articles on legal issues for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, has hit a raw nerve with his haunting book, \”Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights\” (Running Press). The book is an account of the scalding impact of one song – a song about a lynching – on scores of Ameri-can activists, writers, musicians, artists and intellectuals.
It\’s common knowledge that the Jewish exodus from Russia in the late 1980s brought to Israel a flood of talented artists and musicians.
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